paul's place

so i share a building with paul, pictured here. at night we are the only two people in the building, since the ground floor contains offices, a conference room and a library, the next floors are taken up by another library...and we live in the attic-like top. actually, our space is great. we have keys to all the rooms below, so we can go wandering about the books in the middle of the night if we want to. our living area is also pretty spacious by english standards, we each have a study room for our (numerous) books, a bedroom, and then we share a kitchen and a bathroom.
my study room is always a disaster sight as i am not a terribly organised person...i can be when i want to, or if i have to, but normally i just cant be bothered. in any case, i know perfectly well exactly where everything is located, therefore i see no reason to change my system. Paul on the other hand is the most anal retentively organsied person i have ever encountered.
evey book in his possession has its own precise place on the shelf. if you dare move one thing, he notices it within seconds of walking into the room. he especially gets annoyed if you turn a book upside down, or even worse, put it on its side. this is just unforgivable in his world. added to the organised collection of books are his collector's items. by this i mean an odd assortment of military relics. he has got a few helmets, one or two swords, a bunch of german medals, and some paintings depicting battle scenes on the wall. his room is like a shine to his research interests (in case you hadnt guessed, he is a phd student in the history of the military and espionage.) he has even gone so far as to make his study room the only cat free zone in the entire building, which i find highly discriminatory. but of course, that only serves to make his room that much more enticing!
so last night he was in a chatty mood and got out his stash of whisky, which he claims he keeps exclusively for medicinal purposes....as you do....so we sat there amongst the carefully dusted and alfabetised books and drank copious amounts of extremely strong stuff. it was the kind of whisky that tastes like rakija. like you can feel it scorching your insides as it goes down. vodka doesnt do that, it is harsh in the mouth but goes down much more smoothly. and of course, english people have this wierd tradition of drinking WITHOUT food, which i still cant get used to...
after the liver abuse, i ran stumbled back over to my side of the building and decided i had to finish a text i have been reading about postmodernism. i actually did manage to sit up for a few hours and finished the whole book. i am convinced that the whisky is to be thanked for giving me the energy to go on....not that i plan to make a habit out of it!

the pub, again

met igor yesterday evening for a round of pubbing. it will be the last for a while. igor is flying to belgrade on saturday to meet up with ira, and then he is off to moscow. he will be back in mid april, but i will be in paris, so it is unlikely i will see him for a month. i will miss our pub crawls! fortunately, we will soon both be back in moscow, so thinks can continue in a much more hardcore fashion on the other end of the continent soon enough. and ira will be there too, so the fun only gets bigger and bigger!
now i have to go locate a fax machine...maysamba needs to get and english visa, and i need to invite her!

a note about the trains

I have spent a considerable portion of this past year on trains. Actually, I have spent a considerable portion of my life on trains. I have had an obsession since childhood with these sorts of transitory spaces, where everyone is milling about, wasting money, waiting to get somewhere else. Thus I do no think it odd if I spend a few moments avoiding the paper I am supposed to be writing in order to pay homage to Britain’s horrid trains. Ok, they are not as bad as everyone in France (and probably elsewhere) thinks. It seems some networks are better than others. The last time I went to Scotland, the train was 3hours late returning, and I didn’t get home until 2 am or something like that. When I went to a conference in Nottingham, it took me several hours to get there and back. I was travelling from Cambridge and it apparently never dawned on the rail planners in this country to build normal tracks running cross-country, so I ended up on a two wagon contraption that stopped at everyplace between the two destinations. I would have been better off going back to London and heading north from there. But the commuter trains within the southern parts of England are not too awful. I have only been seriously delayed once this year, when someone decided to commit suicide on the tracks, an event for which the train company can hardly be held responsible.


If you travel in daytime, the trains are comfortable enough. In the morning they are hell: you have to pay double the price to travel before 9:30, and you never get a seat anyway, since there are so many commuters that if you get on at any station other than the first, you just have no hope of getting a space. So you have to sit on the floor with the masses. The first time I saw that, I was really shocked. In Russia, it would be unimaginable to see businessmen in expensive suits sitting on the floor of a train, dinking their coffee and reading their newspapers. But here it is an everyday occurrence; there is really no alternative if you don’t live exactly in the centre of London. There is a brief period in the early evening when it is equally as crowded, but not so badly and not for so long. It seems everyone in England goes to work at the same time, but they return at a wide variety of hours. The only train I really hate is the last one of the evening. It is horrid. They always use a really old and rotten train for this hour, which I guess based on the calculation that most of the passengers will be too drunk to notice the uncomfortable seats and peeling walls. The type of passengers depends on the day, but a high number are teenage and intoxicated. Sometimes there are no toilets, and even when there are, it is best to avoid them, as they resemble those in Moscow’s infamous Hungry Duck, circa 1997. Vomit on the floor, piss and shit all over the place…. you get the picture. So when I get stuck on that train, I just try to relax and listen to my music. The worst is that the last train of the night takes forever, since it stops at every little station along the way, not getting to my station until 2 am, which is not fun. If the weather in this country were better, I would never take that train; it would be more fun just to walk around until the morning ones started running at 4:30am. But as it has been cold and pissing rain for the past several months, sitting on a warm train with drunks with drunks in the middle of the night still seems preferable to wandering around on the streets for an extra 3 hours.
A final word: most of the train stations in England are lucky enough to have a Marks&Sparks inside them. This is a really major benefit. I finish work everyday at 3:30 and go running out of the building, across the street, to the station. I then have just less than 5 minutes to choose and pay for my dinner before boarding the 3:45 that takes me to my faculty. Most of the times, I choose something from M&S. I used to go for the baguette sandwiches at Upper Crust, but those get boring really quickly. At M&S they have a much wider variety of food- there are salads and pasta, all ready to go, which makes eating on the train almost bearable. So my daily commute would be a lot less pleasant without M&S.

outrage

I went last night to a dinner party given by a visiting fellow at Robinson College in Cambridge. As usual at such affairs, I was the youngest person by about half a century, a role I am getting used to in this country, where I am constantly running into my parents’ friends…or friends of their friends…. The dinner was ok except for some retired Canadian professor who seemed to think that everything in academia today was going to the dogs, Cambridge wasn’t the place it used to be, standards were falling, young people were barely literate and so on. This really annoyed me. No doubt for centuries there have been retired professors saying such things, and yet the world stumbles on and people manage to write new books, make inventions, find cures to diseases and solutions to problems…. which would suggest that things are not actually falling apart as completely as such people seem to think. I told the professor that I think my generation has never been better prepared for serious research and I feel lucky to be where I am at this moment in time. She disagreed. Oh well. Of course I realise that things aren’t perfect, universities are under funded and there is much to be improved, but I don’t see the situation as entirely hopeless, far from it. I have opportunities that previous generations, especially previous generations of women couldn’t have dreamed of, and I wouldn’t turn back the clocks for anything…. But this was not actually the source of my great outrage. This of course involves a cat.
I met everyone in the porter’s lodge of Robinson College. As I was approaching the lodge, I saw a very nice, polite, well-groomed cat sitting patiently outside the porter’s door. It was drizzling and there was much shelter from the rain in that area, so of course I opened the door and let the cat enter in front of me. The porter then went berserk and ordered the cat out. But why, I protested, the creature was so polite and well behaved, and besides it was dreary and miserable outside. How could any porter refuse entrance under such circumstances? The porter looked at me with a sneer and informed me that the cat was from Selwyn College, and therefore completely unwelcome at Robinson. I was furious. Cats are not the same as stupid beer swigging undergrads who cant keep their jaws shut. Cats are superior beings who should be allowed complete freedom to move unhindered wherever they please, and they should be offered food and shelter whenever they so desire. A cat cannot BELONG to Selwyn or any other college, because cats do not belong to anyone other than their own furry selves. They cannot and should not be confined by useless and artificial borders that reflect divisions only relevant in the obsessive human mind. To deny a visiting cat from Selwyn the right to enter Robinson is an insult to felines everywhere, and I think such provincial tendencies should be resisted with the full strength of the international feline community!
Cats of the world unite!

after the museum we made a tour of cool-shops-selling-things-we-cant-afford just beyond cambridge circuc. we went to fopp and magma and some book shops. and we lamented being poor students. such is life. but if i ever get a job that pays an ok salary, i am going to fill it with great books!

after our non-event shopping expedition, we went up to angel to see a film.

justin has introduced me to the idea of eating popcorn in a strange mixed way. he orders sweet oon the bottom and salty on the top. the first time he suggested this, it sounded odd, but the logic is sound. your tongue gets tired of the salt at some point, and then you get to the sweet part and it seems like a nice change all of a sudden. who would have thought?

so we saw transamerica, a road trip movie with a transexual and his/her son s/he didnt know s/he had. typically american, but it was ok i guess.

then the train home....

tate modern

justin said these figures look like southern americans notions of canada. i guess it could also be west europeans vision of Russia. to me they looked like the piles created by the government snow removers (ie babushki) during the winter. when spring comes (ie in april) the snow melts of the streets and pavements, but it stays in these huge piles for what seems like forever. so that you can even have a warm day where people are wearing short sleeves and passing these huge pils on the streets.
i really like the tate modern. i also appreciate that it is FREE, something i really like about british museums.
we spent probably an hour in the Tate's book shop. it has a great collection of literary and art critisism. they were having a buy one get one free special on "introducing books" unable to resis i got four, with the money that i dont have. but i find the books really helpful in explaining things like semiotics that i am not terribly knowledgable about. so there is my reading for the weekend....
oh, and of course, when we came out of the musuem, it was pouring rain. so much for the nice sunny day away from the library! the rain continued for the whole rest of the afternoon and into the evening.

after the market, we walked to the Tate modern. i love this museum... and it is FREE! one of the major benefits of English museums....so we walked among these....blocks? 

the market has food from everywhere. I tried a massive samosa from the Indian stand, and then some spinach and goat cheese concoction from the italian area. the market has all kinds of bread, cheeses, desserts, spices and so on. not all parts are for those with sensitive stomachs, like the area where they sell whole, unskinned dead bunnies.... 

i like my saturdays; i always end up doing something fun. this saturday started (as usual) in the library, but it was bright and sunny outside, and i couldnt spend the whole day there. so i ,et Justin at King's X and we went down to the Bourough Market.  

the state of things

and so it seems the winter term has come to an end...i am so out of things that i didnt even notice this until yesterday when i saw a sign informing me that the library would be closed for the next 4 saturdays....then i put things together in my head and realised that this probably indicated the end of the second term...not that it makes much difference for me, since my work continues regardless. i still have a lot i have to get done before i leave, but time is rather quickly evaporating. i still have two big things to write and tons of material to go through....agh! last night i was at the faculty for a few hours, but then i realised that i hadnt really planned in head head exactly what materials i needed to get, which made my investigations a bit disorganised and counter productive. so i will have to repeat much of the process today, grr.

my neighbour dan...we were drinking sunday night....and last night the party continued when he decided to make a party in his flat...he is probably the most amazing cook i have ever met. he used to work professionally as a cook, until he got distracted by an MA....

the fun never stops

here is the pub where i was with dan...the days wizz by, i seem to have the idea that if i party i wont notice the weeks that still have to pass before i can leave this place......alcohol helpts pass the time...but so much writing still to do...

in the evening i met up with ian to go to a concert. we heard requiem by gabriel fauré. the performance of it was really excellent. the last part in particular is really beautiful, especially heard with in the building the concert was held in. flash wasnt aloud, so the picture is a little dark, but then it was actually pretty dark inside, which sort of added to the atmosphere.

after the concert we headed (where else?) to a pub.

my liver is in danger, definately time for a break

jeans, sweat shirts and mobiles: the cambridge pub crowd

after we had walked around enough to get sufficiently cold, we went to one of my favourite cambridge pubs and decided to drink. there were tons of jean clad cambridge university students around, includding the girls field hockey team. the were chugging beer in english style quantities (and without food) and we were sipping away at wine and whisky. yura announced he felt old all of a sudden, in his dress shirt, trousers and jacket.  

me, experimenting with the features on my latest camera in one of the collages.  

yura and i spent the afternoon walking around cambridge. it was (almost) sunny, but bitterly cold in that hideous wet english way. yuri said it felt way colder than moscow, where he was back visiting last weekend. we went around the collages and reministed about the good old days when we were students living in moscow state university housing. we even reministed about the food they used to feed us in stolovaia, which i guess is a testiment to nostalgia. yuri's got a summer job in investment banking in london, so he will be here all summer. then in the autumn he finishes his MBA at INSEAD and hopes that the company will take him on permenantly. the salary is....grotesque. 

lovely

 

vertigo

this is what happens when you stay in the library until late at night. we now have extended hours that leave the place open until midnight...it is just too exciting. the urge to stay late is just overpowering. 

i suppose i should have dedicated a foto of shelves dedicated to milosevic instead;;;but many of the books on his reign were checked out! there seems to have been a mourning inspired rush to read all about the guy....so you will ahve to accept these images of literary dedication to tito instead 

ok i guess my library fotos cannot compete with the stark beauty of marcus's pavement images, but i am trying nonetheless to improve the quality of my thrilling book fotos. enjoy 

czechs and slovaks

 

swiss

 

koreans

 

so here are some of my students in the pub on wednesday night 

benders

wednesday was pub night. this is an event the school where i work does (i think) once a week. normally the school social coordinator organises it, but she was lucky enough to be on holiday in portugal this week, so the job fell to me...not that i am complaining: i had a grand time. who can complain about being paid to drink with a bunch of young people from around the world?
so i spent several hours hearing about life in korea or slovakia and enjoyed a healthy dose of wine....such outings are great in limited doses, but as luck has it i seem to be on a bender role. thursday i got an email from yura saying he had just showed up in london with a portuguese friend and did i want to me for drinks? i hadnt seen the guy since last july so of course i couldnt say no. so we met for "a drink" and ended up making the rounds of various pubs in the neighbourhood. and it seems the bender is going to stretch into day 3...i am waiting for the "where are we meeting" phone call right now.....

up to my old tricks

agh, when the slaves are away, i can fully inspect my territory!

another day.....

the problem is that some books just cant be taken out of the library, hence the long hours at station 210

dodgy pubs

i hate the start of the week. i really dread it. there is always so much that needs to get done and the feeling that i will not suceed in doing everything i have to do.
the alarm clock woke me out of bed as i had agreed to do some early morning overtime at a place where i sometimes work to get extra cash...then the evening i spent holed up in one of the top floors of senate house trying to get things together for my huge exam in october. you might wonder why i am panicing now over an exam that is 7 months away, but i assure you it is with good reason. i have about 80 pages of original work that i have to get together and submit before then, nevermind a pile of books to read....so i am starting to stress.
finnally, when my brain could take no more, and senate house was moving into its late night tomb mode, i decided i need something strong to drink. so i met max (the polish guy from the "managing YOUR phd seminar") and we went to the dodgiest of dodgy student pubs. it was one of those places where you feet stick to the floor as you walk. we drank and noted that whatever england's problems may be, there is still nothing worse than france. it seems max also had the dubious pleasure of killing of some months there, so we agreed that RIBs are the most pointless things ever invented, and reministed about the various bureaucratic struggles we had undertaken, and agreed that even poland and russia were much more efficient, which pretty much says it all i guess.
then i stumbled onto the train and headed home. and now i am looking out the window through which i can see that it is pissing rain....again

sundays

so i was in the senate house library when i got the news. it came at me almost simultaneously from accorss europe. the first message arrive in russian: slobodan milosevic umer nochu. i had just the time to respond my shock to that message than a new one came in from le murana in lisbon.....i decided i had done enough work for the morning and bolted to the postgrad computer lab were i read the various conflicting reports for myself, telephoned people in budapest/belgrade/moscow......i am sure somewhere near metro station akedemicheskaia my old supervisor was angry and dissapointed. i am sure in the next few days there we be articles publised by guskova and the whole moscow gang saying he was murdered, if not delibrately than by neglect. he had wanted to go to russia for medical care and they hadnt let him: murder one way or the other. i can hear it all already.
so slobo is gone for better or worse....what next?
after catching up on that, i met igor to discuss the events. we wandered around regent's park and stopped to eat some cake in a restaurant named the honest ham....whatever that means.....i tried not eat eat too much since i had one of danka's great dinner parties at 8pm, where as always i overate....her parties always involve 6 courses and tons of alcohol....i am normally the youngest guest by about 50 years, so i get to perform the role of the starving young post grad who hasnt seen a meal in weeks, a part i am happy to play. so i stuffed myself and rolled home and straight into bed, collapsing into a coma like sleep

Скончался Слободан Милошевич

Скончался Слободан Милошевич
Лондон. 11 марта. ИНТЕРФАКС - Британский телеканал Sky News сообщил в субботу о кончине бывшего президента Югославии Слободана Милошевича.
Со ссылкой на сербскую радиостанцию В-92 Sky News передает, что С.Милошевич был найден мертвым в своей камере в тюрьме в Гааге.
В интервью Би-би-си адвокат С.Милошевича Стивен Кэй подтвердил, что тело его подзащитного было найдено в субботу утром в камере Международного трибунала по бывшей Югославии МТБЮ.
"В последнее время состояние здоровья 64-летнего бывшего лидера Югославии вызывало опасения", - добавил адвокат.
МТБЮ фактически официально признал смерть С.Милошевича. Трибунал сообщил, что начал расследование по факту смерти экс-президента Югославии.
Министр иностранных дел Франции Филипп Дуст-Блази заявил в Зальцбурге, что С.Милошевич умер "по естественным причинам".
В январе защита С.Милошевича передала Международному трибуналу по бывшей Югославии (МТБЮ) документы, на основании которых трибунал должен был принять решение о временном освобождении экс-президента для его поездки на лечение в Россию.
Директор российского Научного центра сердечно-сосудистой хирургии имени Бакулева Лео Бокерия заявил тогда о наличии всех оснований для того, чтобы С.Милошевич прошел курс лечения в этом московском медицинском учреждении.
В интервью "Интерфаксу" Л.Бокерия отметил, что сам С.Милошевич в случае положительного решения вопроса просит разрешения лечиться в Центре имени Бакулева. "Для этого есть резонные основания", - подчеркнул директор Центра.
Он пояснил, что медики этого учреждения неоднократно обследовали С.Милошевича.
По результатам обследования было установлено, что в состоянии здоровья С.Милошевича имеются нарушения, свидетельствующие, в частности, "о декомпенсации мозгового кровообращения и неадекватности получаемой им терапии".
"Совершенно очевидно, что пациент нуждается в дообследовании и этиопатогенетическом лечении в специализированном стационаре", - подчеркнул руководитель Научного центра.
Он сообщил, что в связи с этим в середине декабря 2005 года направил председателю Гаагского трибунала Фаусто Покару письмо с предложением направить С.Милошевича для дообследования и лечения в Научный центр сердечно-сосудистой хирургии имени Бакулева.
Что касается возвращения пациента по требованию суда, то, отметил глава Центра, С.Милошевичем "лично подписано соответствующее заявление, а также были даны гарантии Министерством иностранных дел РФ"
Однако члены МТБЮ в Гааге отказались удовлетворить просьбу 64- летнего бывшего президента Югославии.

friday, finally

the week has gone by really quickly, yet at the same time it has seemed really long...i am glad it is friday. i finish work early on fridays, which is a really great thing. i think all jobs should have something like that.
my letter of permission to be absent from the faculty arrived yesterday, so that removes the last barrier to my leaving, yeah!

managing YOUR PhD

Yesterday for the first time i got myself organised, took a day off work, and attended one of the university’s “methodological seminars.” The title of the subject in which we were supposed to be receiving instruction was “managing YOUR PhD.” It was an occasion for overblow education experts to apply thacherite corporate business vocabulary to academics. Maybe that way they can tell themselves they are in “corporate work” rather than admitting they are simply....people with education degrees...
So i walk into the room. Actually i walked in twice. The first time i was 10 minutes early. I took one look in at the uptight crowd of early arriving students and decided to get a coffee from the student union before subjecting myself to their company.
So i entered the room again 5 minutes late. By this time there were about 50 still uptight students, and a powerpoint display on the wall reading “YOU are the manager of YOUR PhD.” No shit.
For the next 7hours, we were informed that we are managers...and were told all the things we should be doing (as effective “managers”) we learned that we need “perseverence, organisation.” But that we have to avoid that trap that ensnares so many high achievers: work acholism. We were told we have to “know when to take a brake.” And so on. This pearl of wisdom was followed by a series of role plays. My favourite was “saying no to your supervisor.” Here we saw models of students saying no: the passive student, the assertive student, the aggressive student....
Mercifully, i happened to be sitting next to a polish guy, who, like me, felt we were being force fed a load of crap. So we passed notes and took the piss out of the whole thing. The scary thing was there were alot of science students who took the whole thing ultra seriously. They furiously took down notes and nodded vigorously. One thrid year phd even said that these seminars were the most memorable part of her degree....sadly this may even have been the truth, as her specialisation is about molecular biology (another girl was studying the genetic factors that contribute to the shape of the jaw....)
The seminar did have one great redeeming feature: and endless supply of free chocolat biscuits. I must have had at least 15, i would have fallen asleep otherwise.

spring isnt here yet and i have decided to bury my nose in wool until it arrives. except that i have a dinner to go to in south kensington... 

each packet of soup makes a cup full. it is a delicious, as you can see! 

having informed week before last how dirty i am as a towel recycling european, this week they brought me different kinds of soup to try. this "europeanism soup" was quite good.